New York in the '50s (54 page)

And in spite of all the hazards and handicaps of New York in the nineties, look at all the people still here who never left, who couldn't imagine life in another realm: Harvey Shapiro, Marion Magid, Norman Podhoretz, Allen Ginsberg, Murray Kempton, Knox Burger, Kitty Sprague, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Norman Mailer, Ned O'Gorman, Norm Eddy, Ray Grist, Walter Goodman … When all is said and done, more are still here from my time than have left.

Jane Richmond stayed in New York but moved from the Village to the East 60s. For her, going back to the Village now is like stepping into her old life: “I hadn't been there for something like ten years. The presence of the past was so great it was like having a coat on. I felt like I was invisible at the deli, the newsstand. It was like
Our Town
, when Emily goes back and sees everything but the people can't see her. The sense of the past was so strong it almost took the breath out of me.”

“Everyone is dispersed,” Meg Greenfield says. “We were transients and we had our community—we had solidarity and stability. Now I go back and it's like a sandstorm had blown over and buried the place, like it never happened. That life and community we knew are not there.”

I tell her of Helen Weaver's theory about the “real” Village being buried underneath the current “stage set” we see now, and Meg laughs and says, “Yes, and if you did that excavation to unearth the
real Village, we'd all be down there. We'd be going to Balducci's grocery on Sixth Avenue, and the women from the house of detention would be hollering down at us like they always did, and at night we'd go to that place on MacDougal Street, the San Remo, and then to the Portofino …”

When she says this I get tears in my eyes, fantasizing for a moment that it's possible, like Alice going through the looking glass, and I think,
I'd do it in a second
. I don't want to recapture the pain, of course, the drunken nights and hangovers and the dark mornings on the analyst's couch, but I'd like to get back the excitement, and most of all the people, the friends. Talking to them again, wherever they are, I feel an old camaraderie. I'm comfortable with them in a way I'd forgotten, as if I'm with my own people again—the refugees from the provinces or boroughs, the dreamers, the misfits like me, the ones with talent and problems, the daring ones, the witty and understanding, the loyal ones. I know I'm romanticizing now, but New York still does that to me—maybe just because I don't live there anymore.

Going to Seymour Krim's memorial service at the Village Gate a few years ago brought back many of the friends from those days whom I hadn't seen for many years—Art d'Lugoff, Ned Polsky, Jim Finn, and other habitués of the back room of the White Horse. We took to the stage and told good stories about our friend Sy, and David Amram, with his usual verve, played French horn as he led a group in a composition he wrote in honor of Krim.

Yet none of that brought back the spirit of the times as much as a postcard I got a week or so later, written by Krim himself just before his death, and sent on to me by his lawyer and friend Bruce Ricker. Since Krim had chosen in full consciousness to end his own life, on instructions he asked for from the Hemlock Society (because he didn't want to live on physically incapable of taking care of himself), he knew the time of his passing, and just before it he wrote to some friends.

In the old days he used to send postcards just like this to fellow writers when he saw a piece of theirs he admired, cheering them on (Nat Hentoff and Walter Goodman mentioned with gratitude such messages, which I myself had received from Krim), and the tone of this card was equally generous and uplifting. He explained that he
had been quite ill—“heart failure and circulation turbulence”—but that “I wouldn't want to check out without expressing affection at an unshakeable level.… I always had good times with you, my friend.” He spoke about my book
Returning: A Spiritual Journey
, which he'd reviewed favorably in the
Chicago Tribune
, but he wished that in chronicling my own troubles with psychoanalysis I had mentioned his piece “The Insanity Bit.” Krim was a writer to the end. He forgave me, though: “But what the hell. You've forged an unexpected path for yourself, I take my hat off to you even though it is not for moi.” Then he corrected a line I had misquoted from O'Neill's
Strange Interlude
, and ended by saying, “Just wanted to make touch, wish you the happiness that's possible. And the Work!”

His fifties code of ethics prevailed to the last.

Renewing bonds with friends who remain when I spent those few months in New York in the early part of 1991 turned out to be more enriching than I'd expected. I never even had a fantasy of living in New York again, but such wild ideas really came to me then, in spite of the grime and the crime, the sense of danger and drugs and the homeless, the dilapidation and the sky-high expense and what Nat Hentoff calls the show-business aspect of current New York. There were times, though, and people, and places: walking through Washington Square, hearing the political gossip in the jacuzzi at the Paris Health Club, laughing with Jane Richmond, reminiscing with Norm Eddy in East Harlem, and going to dinner at the Blue Mill with Ted the Horse. I don't think I'd have the guts and courage—and money—to really go back, but at such times, with such old friends, I was thinking, well, maybe I could just go back for a little while. Then the lines came back to me that we used to recite on West 92nd Street, or on the roof at 10th and Bleecker, John Reed's ode to New York that we said with the requisite sophisticated satire but also an eerie, exciting sort of chill:

Who that has known thee but shall burn

In exile till he come again

To do thy bitter will, O stern

Moon of the tides of men!

Image Gallery

James Baldwin gave generously of his advice and his bourbon to young writers who gathered at his apartment on Horatio Street in the Village. (
Carl Van Vechten Collection, Library of Congress
)

William F. Buckley, Jr., provided youth, eloquence, charm, and a new magazine,
The National Review
, to the conservative cause. (
Gert Berliner
)

David Markson met Jack Kerouac for the first time at a neighbor's apartment, bust the famous author of
On the Road
had already done too much partying for the night. (
Elaine Markson
)

Helen Weaver met Kerouac when he came back to New York from San Francisco in 1956, and felt he “had endless imagination, and that gorgeous Massachusetts accent—and his sweetness.” (
Courtesy of Helen Weaver
)

Murray Kempton's column in the
New York Post
seemed to his fans like Proust working as a city desk reporter. (
New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress
)

Dan Wakefield (right) and Murray Kempton of the New York Post at the Emmett Till murder trial. September 1955. (
The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
)